Mayonnaise

Until the day that she left her house to live with my parents, my grandmother kept in the cupboard under her stairs a stock of toilet rolls which would have been the envy of many a moderate sized supermarket. The reason was simple; a rumour had gone round that there was going to be a shortage of them. My grandmother’s reaction to the word shortage was one of instant and total panic. Shortage of baked beans? In a twinkling she would visit every shop in the neighbourhood and be the proud possessor of enough tins of baked beans to cause a flatulent explosion with the power of a small nuclear bomb. Admittedly it had to be something she herself used. It was pointless suggesting to her that there didn’t seem to be as many Ferraris around as there used to be, or that the burning down of a factory which made chocolate ice cream might destabilise the market.

In just the same way (or, I suppose, in just the opposite way) she would react to any health scare by removing from her house every last trace of the tainted objects. As I grew up I learnt to ignore these things, but as a child I assumed that adults knew best. So when, as the result of a typhoid scare in South America, my grandmother declared that the very smell of a slice of corned beef could wipe out the entire village, I went along with her and resolutely refused to touch it. All logic suggests that it should soon have worn off, but for the next twenty five years, until I became a vegetarian, thus making the whole issue immaterial, no blandishment of Mr Fray or Mr Bentos could persuade me to let a morsel of it pass my lips.

In adult life I discovered that, when it came to health scares, there were many more like my grandmother. One foodstuff after another was declared carcinogenic, an enemy of the cardio-vascular system, a source of BSE or liable to cause an almost instant weight gain of 10 kilos. There was so much to believe that I ended up believing none of it.

Then came that wonderful day when it was announced that raw eggs were a source of salmonella poisoning. Of course all too soon some organisation such as the British Egg Production League (which disappointingly turned out to be composed of humans rather than poultry) magiced up a bevy of tame scientists who declared first that raw eggs were only dangerous to pregnant women over the age of 60, then that they were not dangerous at all, and ultimately even that in some mysterious way they could be said to protect you against salmonella.

But in between, there were those few glorious sun-filled weeks when people stopped filling every sandwich they could find with mayonnaise.

I don’t like mayonnaise. I could not say that I hate it. I eat it regularly. However I eat it regularly not because I enjoy it, but because it is regularly so difficult to get a ready-made sandwich without it.

I suppose I could claim it is all a matter of patriotism – that I refuse to countenance a foodstuff which commemorates a British naval defeat. Mayonnaise is named after Port Mahon, where in 1756 the French Duc de Richlieu asked his chef to produce a celebration meal at which they could all stuff their faces after stuffing the British navy. The chef soon had everything ready except a sauce, at which point he found there was no cream left. So he used olive oil instead, and hoped no one would notice. They did, but still for some inscrutable Gallic reason liked it.

However patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not the mere disliker of mayo; so I will confine myself to asking: why is it always assumed that we want this emulsified gunk in our sandwiches? Why is there no one prepared to risk niche marketing plain simple food?

I dimly remember as a child a local department store having a sign which appeared to say “See Percy Thrower [the Alan Titchmarsh of his day] in our gardening department” but when examined carefully actually read “See a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Percy Thrower in our gardening department”. I should have remembered this when I allowed my careless heart to skip a beat after I recently saw a range of sandwiches called something along the lines of Plain Simple Foods. One of them advertised ‘Just Cheese’. Or as I saw when I actually picked it up and examined it: Just Cheese and mayo.